Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology

7 The Masters of Suspicion

103 [The will] is the point that remains for ever inaccessible to all human knowledge precisely as it is. —Schopenhauer [The id] is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality. —Freud As a foremost “master of suspicion,” Schopenhauer was one of the primary participants in the “unmasking” trend of the nineteenth century. He strove to uncover the very nature of even hidden dimensions of human experience; indeed, Schopenhauer emphasized that this goal explicitly formed the central endeavor of his entire unified philosophy: [It] can be explained that in all we know, a certain something remains hidden from us as being quite unfathomable, and we must confess that we are unable to understand even the commonest and simplest phenomena . . . it must be that things exhibit themselves in a manner quite different from their own inner nature, and that therefore they appear as through a mask. This mask enables us always merely to assume, never to know, what is hidden beneath it; and this something then gleams through as an inscrutable mystery.1 In Schopenhauer’s endeavor to access the inaccessible nature of reality, he couched the problem explicitly in Kantian terms: “On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-itself.”2 Schopenhauer found that intellect , reason and science all failed to access the thing-in-itself because they failed to recognize that the ultimate nature of reality is not representational : The Masters of Suspicion: Schopenhauer and Freud on the Inaccessible Nature of Humanity 7 [That] about which we are enquiring must be by its whole nature completely and fundamentally different from the representation; and so the forms and laws of the representation must be wholly foreign to it. We cannot, then, reach it from the representation under the guidance of those laws . . . the forms of the principle of sufficient reason.3 According to Schopenhauer, the mind constructs its world via representation and then forgets that this world is its own construction, thereby misidentifying the latter as able to apprehend reality as it actually is. By starting with representation we shall never get beyond the representation —that is, the phenomenal world. “We shall therefore remain at the outside of things; we shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature , and investigate what they are in themselves.”4 Given that reason and science (which operates within the epistemological constraints of logic and empirical observation) fail to enable us to apprehend the inaccessible, what else is there? The obvious candidate for Schopenhauer was metaphysics, and he was staunch in his advocacy of metaphysics as the way to apprehend the inaccessible: Our philosophy proceeds from the phenomenal appearance to that which appears, to that which is hidden behind the phenomenon; thus metaphysics.5 By metaphysics I understand all so-called knowledge that goes beyond the possibility of experience, and so beyond nature or the given phenomenal appearance of things, in order to give information about that by which this experience or nature is conditioned . . . but that which is hidden behind nature, and renders nature possible.6 It was the responsibility of metaphysics to inquire into that hidden, “inexplicable something” which forms the “ultimate basis” upon which everything else is grounded.7 Furthermore, when metaphysics was conjoined with genius remarkable progress could be made in apprehending the inaccessible : The purely objective apprehension of the world, the apprehension of genius, is conditioned by a silencing of the will so profound that so long as it lasts, even the individuality disappears from consciousness, and the man remains pure subject of knowing.8 Yet Schopenhauer was equally clear—and this is a highly significant point from Freud’s perspective—that metaphysics “cannot be spun out of mere 104 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E abstract concepts, but must be based on observation and experience, both inner and outer.”9 Empirical observation must serve as the foundation of metaphysics.10 Hence, science was not to be thrown out the window; rather, the conclusions of genuine philosophy and science must be consistent, thereby reinforcing one another. Indeed, Schopenhauer emphasized that this was what made his neglected work, The Will in Nature, of particularly crucial significance: For, starting from the purely empirical, from observations of impartial investigators of nature who pursue the line of their special science, I reach here directly the real core of my metaphysics...